The Institute of Medicine estimates that medical error is responsible for roughly 98,000 deaths annually, making it the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. Accordingly, reducing the likelihood of error is an important issue not only for hospitals and doctors, but for society as a whole.
To alleviate some of these concerns, some hospitals provide nurses with medical carts on which a networked laptop computer facilitates the use of Electronic Medical Administration Records (“EMAR”). EMAR is an electronic record of medications and services administered by a healthcare professional through patient and medication identification via bar coding. When admitted into a hospital, the patient receives a bar coded wrist band for identification purposes. Also, healthcare professionals within the pharmacy bar code all the medications to be administered to the patients. Documentation of medications given at the point-of-care has reduced the number of errors by ensuring that the right patient is receiving the proper medication at the correct time. The EMAR software alerts the nurse if there is a discrepancy anytime during the medication administration process.
Unfortunately, however, these medical carts have proven unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. For example, the carts are not ergonomically designed. The average age of a nurse is 47 and roughly 83% of nurses report suffering chronic back pain. In addition, the existing EMAR carts suffer from a relative lack of work surface, lack of an area to dispose of refuse, bad placement of medication drawers, lack of storage space, and relative inability to be usefully raised and lowered to enable the nurse to work when either standing or sitting.
In many hospital environments, a nurse must walk to a central location (e.g., a pyxis machine) at which medication is handled to obtain medication for a particular patient. Often, to avoid giving the wrong medication to a patient, the nurse only carries one patient's medication at a time. This control, however, does not preclude the potential for the medication to be given to the wrong patient such as, for example, if the nurse is sidetracked and asks another nurse to administer the medication.
In addition to the above-mentioned concerns, when one takes into account the number of patients which a nurse must handle, the result is that the nurse must spend a considerable amount of time walking between the central location and each patient's bedside. This problem is exacerbated in some situations in which the central location is located a significant distance from one or more of the patients for which the nurse is responsible. Moreover, the cost associated with paying nurses to continuously travel to and from various medication locations may be relatively insignificant at the level of a particular nurse but is quite significant to the medical industry as a whole.
What is needed, therefore, is an apparatus and a methodology by which medical error may be reduced and by which the amount of time a nurse spends obtaining and researching medication may be reduced, without compromising safety.